Hey all!

I am so excited that I get to share this with you guys so soon! Since working on the transitions, I've also been working on getting a green screen effect using only the VSE and GOD has been super gracious to me in that this morning HE showed me how to "formulate" the process to where you only need adjust the effect.

I had just uploaded the test when I felt led to record it and get it online using the example footage, as it really is a good example. Remember though, if you want to do co...
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Hey all!

Today I get to share with you guys a brand new Quick Tip video. In this one, we talk about transitions. Whether we do tutorials, animations or even tests, we will eventually come to the point where we would need to edit something, and that is where transitions come in. I believe the simpler they are, the better, because fancy effects are more for showing off, not really everyday use. This video, will show you a way that allows you to go a little over the top, while also allowing your ...
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Hey all!

Super glad to be able to get this video done. I have quite a story behind this one that I know you are gonna luv reading, so to prevent the temptation of watching first, the tutorial is at the bottom of the post.

Why cover caustics in Cycles when it was done in Blender Render already?
   A fairly obvious question to those who use Cycles, but not to everyone. Cycles is a newer engine in Blender and is built for realism. This makes things like toon-style NPR extremely difficult. Styles li...
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Hey all!

What a busy few days!! Goodness! I am so thankful that GOD gave me the efficiency to be able to produce so many videos so quickly!! :D

I received a comment on the Camp Fire tutorial from a Cycles user and that he had a fair idea on how to produce it in Cycles and I kinda of felt a little tug from GOD that I need to do a little bit more towards the Cycles side of thing and I couldn't shake the sense to do it and felt lead to start doing more towards toon shading in Cycles, so this is th...
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Hey all!

A while ago, I posted an article about the edge that ZTransparency (in Blender Render) creates around solid faces in front of it and sometimes possibly even behind it. Just as a reminder, here is the image:


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Good day everyone!

Today I saw that Yola added a new widget; a button!

Now, considering that this is a new widget, it will be basic, but functional. The catch comes when resisting the temptation to place it everywhere to replace whatever it is you've already done.

I've personally been using the custom panel widget to create buttons and they've worked really well so far; considering of course that only the text inside is clickable, they look like this:

For the time being, the button itself, looks ...
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Hey all!

Today I can give you a tip. While I mentioned it earlier, I wanna reiterate this:
- Warping is not a solid state influencer, in other words, as the camera moves, so does the warping. This plays to your advantage, as it can be used for various ice effects without having to use reflections.

Here are two examples:

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Hey all!

I've seen that Blender has this option in the File button, but I've never known how to use it, until Andrew showed it in his second video on Blender's interface (please answer his surveys in the video descriptions on YouTube).

By default, from what I recall, this feature is turned on and does an auto-save every 5 minutes. These are, according to Andrew's video, stored in either your temporary files or the Blend1 and Blend2 files you see where you store the original project.

Thankfully, ...
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Hey all!

I'm not someone who specializes in realism, but I have noticed some features in Blender Render that I have been very happy with in getting me closer to realism and I'd like to share some of them with you. Remember, most of these apply to Cycles as well and also to traditional arts!

- Ambient Occlusion (AO)
A strange corner shadow phenomenon I've never really seen much of in real life on the intensity that Blender can produce, though it is a fantastic boost, even on a low setting, set on...
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Hey there!

Good day and welcome to this Quick blog tutorial! (will make a logo later, so they'll be easily identifiable by more than just category)

Now, today's little tip applies again to the compositor (a place everyone seems to luv chromatic aberration, haha).

I'm sure many of you, if not all, have used a digital camera.
   Everyone who has used one, knows that it's light sensor can adjust it's sensitivity to what it is seeing. For example, if you put it's focus on a lamp, it will darken the i...
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Hey peoples!

During a tutorial I found that in some cases, it is actually better (and faster) to use physical detail than it is to use textures.

It works a bit like this:
____________________________________________________
small object------>------>------>------>------>------>---Big object
physical>physical>physical<mix>texture>texture>texture

So when you are doing something like trees or bushes, try physical detail first and see if that works for you.

Here is a mix of physical detail and textures:...
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Hey all!

Only started the tree tutorial and almost finished. Yey!

Has been quite a bit of work and I am really jazzed about the result. In it, you will be shown how to do a little something like this:

I like this image a lot and I made like two other compositions, but this one just worked the best for the tutorial. While this is merely a proof of concept, I leave it up to you to really push it further in making it work in your scene (I don't have a scene requiring trees right now, so there is no...
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Hey all!

I sent this tip to a friend a few days ago and posted it on his page called The Blender Hot Spot.

So, here it is again, using a screen capture from my Christmas competition entry blend, because it is a fitting project.

You can set each render layer to have it's own sample count. In the render options, under layers, above the passes it will render (such as Z, Vector and Ambient Occlusion, etc), there is a sample count. When set to 0, it uses the number you put in for the render above the...
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Heya!

Been working on a basic mask for the floor. This shows how it is progressing, from a top view (which you need to use while doing this, otherwise you don't have a clue as to what is where):


Basically, you can use gradient textures to make basic masks and I really do recommend them. I will also add though, that you will face some difficulty when it comes to coloring or boosting the brightness of the mask, without ruining it completely. I recommend adding a Brightness/Contrast one to make th...
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Hey all!

I really enjoy seeing views on the website and I particularly enjoy it when I know that what you find here is interesting and educational to you at the same time, so thank you for your support. Feel free to tell your friends about this blog and the upcoming book on procedural textures (^^,)!

Back to the post. Today I started working on the ruin + ivy scene. I want to, through this tutorial show you that you can achieve some extremely complex things you may not even have dreamed possibl...
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Hey all!

Working hard to get it finished as soon as possible! The next section will be tutorials and after that a few more things and it should be ready for release! So looking forward to having it completed and I have really learned a huge amount in the writing of it!

Today was a continuation of the displacement feature for Cycles. After getting this result, it was very important to find out how to fix it:

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When you use the halo lamp in Blender to create some form of beams or solid light, you need to remember that Blender is still growing in it's alpha support and the halo lamp has only two settings when it comes to transparent objects: visible and invisible.

This means that you have to know that the light-beams are not going to shine through a transparent object, only the light itself:


Another thing you need to be careful of is reflective materials. When a halo lamps shines through a transparent ...
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This image is a custom colored version of a cloud procedural texture with a cell noise basis. What that means is that the procedural texture is made and written mainly for creating clouds or texturing them, either by deformation of a shape or just using color, or both. The basis is how the texture will be made, or put together. There are many options in Blender regarding basis, but this one is cool for a few reasons.
   I've been a fan of this kind of pattern for a long time, but I've always h...
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